32 - How to make a motion path

Hey there, in this video we're going to look at a 'Motion Path'. So we've kind of made them already. You have a look through this animation, if I click on this, that is the motion path. So that's following along. If you've got one like me, already created, what you can do is, you can click on this dot, and you're looking for-- so you clicked on the squares, right? Then you're looking out for these little, sneaky-- They're hard to see. I totally understand if you're finding it painful to see because I do too. These little dots here.

If I grab this guy, there's the little dot. If I grab it, I can edit this motion path. If you've ever used Illustrator before or any sort of anchor point tool this is going to be easy enough, you can start doing it. Watch him, click him. Click him. That means it just kind of changes the way it edits. Sorry, the way he floats in this path. So instead of just going straight across, watch this. Kind of follow along, if you need more control, say you need him to do something over here, what you do is, you get him to do what you want. Up there. So I know, in my time limit, about there, what I'd like to do is twirl it down. Thank you, Bank of Ireland. Let's twirl this down. And let's go to here, so we're here on my key frames. And I'm going to put in a 'Position', 'Scale'. Ah, 'Position' 'Key frame'.

And you see, if I move along, now there's another little square. So this square is kind of our anchor point, and the line has to pass through it. These little guys on the outside, think of them as gravity, like little moons, they kind of drag the line, it has to pass through the anchor point, but these little moons pull the-- tug on the lines. So you can mess around with here.

Let's say you didn't have-- you want to have a start with one, so what I'm going to do is, I'm going to turn my 'Position' off. If I click on this key frame-- be careful when you click this stuff, it wipes off all your key frames. This is what I wanted a moment ago. So I'm going to put my timer back to here. And I'm going to turn it off. They're all gone. So I'm just going to create one by-- create a motion path to get started with. What I'm going to do is drag it along to the end. And I'll physically drag my tiny little speck. The scale's all the way down, that's why he's tiny. And then I'm going to-- oops, I'm going to put him back here. 'Undo' it.

So, don't forget, I'm going to turn it off, then turn it back on. So it's starting to record again, I've got my first key frame. Then this guy, he gets smaller and smaller. Out here, I'm going to move him till here. Nice. And you watch. Here he goes, and then he moves along there. And it's pretty much the same, right? It just means, instead of having the bins that are already there, if I click on any of these guys look out for the little dots, and I can play around with this. To add more key frames put your play here, where you want it to be a key frame, so you can see, my little guy's lined up there. Add another diamond. And move it around.

One thing we haven't done yet is the Oriental path, because at the moment it's kind of following along and it's kind of weird. It's not changing direction, if you know what I mean, just kind of like going sideways for bits of it. So what we're going to do is, get him to Oriental path. And what we need to do is, you saw, I actually stuck it on the layers, go to 'Layer', 'Transform', and there's one in there called 'Auto-Orient', click on that. Turn 'Orient Along Path' on, and it's going to kind of work, watch this, click 'OK'. And I scroll back. It's kind of moving along the path, not quite how I imagined. Here he is now, permanently going sideways. You can see, it's kind of adjusting as the path goes along.

So what I'd like to do is, get him back to the beginning. And what we need to do-- you can see it's kind of lined up weirdly to the edge here, so he's following it as he jumps on to the line there. So what we need to do is adjust him here. So, right back at the beginning here we're going to grab our 'Rotation' tool. I'm going to click and drag him. What we want to do is kind of like, you see, my line kind of comes out there, I'm going to zoom in. You can see, it kind of heads off that way. So what I want to do is make sure he's lined up with where the trajectory of that line heads away. You have to play around with it, but now, if I zoom out, hit 'Space' bar, it kind of does what I had hoped he'd do a bit more. Following along the line, he loops along. My Octopus. Let's hit 'Space' bar, hit 'Save'. And that is motion paths in After Effects.